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In the glossary of Ontario’s new Health and Education curriculum, the last entry is “two-spirited.”

“A term used by First Nations people to refer to a person having both the feminine and masculine spirits,” reads the definition. “It includes sexual or gender identity, sexual orientation, social roles and a broad range of identities, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.”

Keep that in mind. We’ll return to it in a minute.

I read the curriculum for grades 1 to 8 this week to understand what the fuss is about. Judging by talk radio, TV street interviews and many online comments, some parents are clearly disturbed by the revised educational mandate, especially the parts that deal with sex ed.

The reaction was so fierce, I wondered if that mystery tunnel discovered near York University was actually the work of a coalition of parents hoping to create their own underground classroom: “Kathleen Wynne is hell-bent on indoctrinating our kids! This is nothing more than social engineering! They’re planning to use the words penis and vagina! Keep digging!”

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As a father of twin girls who will be in Grade 4 this fall, I must say, the blowback was as mysterious as the tunnel.

Did I miss something while slogging through the 239 pages? Granted, this is possible given the writing style that seemed to be inspired by the legalese of software agreements: “This experiential approach gives responsibility to the teacher to act as facilitator and to maximize participation and fun by making adaptations that optimize the level of challenge for all participants and by giving students opportunities to make their own adaptations to the activities.”

Fun never sounded so lethally dull.

But if I didn’t miss anything while chugging Red Bull and trying to prop open my eyelids with toothpicks, I will now submit my take-away. This new Health and Education curriculum is striving to make our children — wait for it — healthier and more educated.

Which brings us back to “two-spirited” and a poignant documentary that airs Thursday night. Transforming Gender (CBC, 9 p.m.) should be required viewing for everyone on either side of this week’s sex-ed debate. I encourage you to spend one hour in the company of people like 12-year-old Olie Pullen, who was born “Oliver” but quickly realized something was wrong.

“I just didn’t feel right in who I was,” she says. “I really just thought, ‘Am I in the right body?’”

There is no narration. No graphics. No polemicizing. Instead, a series of personal vignettes are stitched together as transgender people from all different ages and backgrounds share their life stories. These lives and stories could be much less harrowing if the world at large was — wait for it — healthier and better educated.

The take-away? We are failing these Canadians.

Just about everything most of us take for granted — getting a job, renting or buying a house, finding a partner, walking down the street without fear of harassment — is fraught with torturous unknowns for the transgender community.

Remember, this is not a historical documentary. It’s all happening now.

And you know what? There was just something about Olie and all of these stories that will resonate this week.

I think it was her gentle smile and almost shy manner of speaking, which reminded me so much of my own daughters. It would kill me if my girls ever had to endure what these citizens have endured.

Which brings us back to the sex-ed debate.

Frankly, I want my daughters to learn as much as they can about sex and human relationships. I want them to take an active interest in their own physical and mental health. I want them to be aware of sexting and cyberbullying, two realities that didn’t exist when the curriculum was last revised in 1988. I want them to respect themselves and, equally important, respect others, especially those who’ve been marginalized and discriminated against and generally misunderstood, all because they don’t neatly fit into a socio-cultural box.

The world is a very different place from when I received the bulk of my sex education in a hydro field as other kids passed around magazines they’d swiped from their father’s bedside drawers and most conversations ended with, “Then what happens?”

There were no smartphones, no Internet, no tablets, no easy access to images a billion times more startling than anything in those magazines. The sex ed taught in our classrooms back then was so biologically clinical, so devoid of any social links to the real world, most kids I know barely paid attention. We didn’t really understand what was being taught or why it might be important.

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